Paul Muldoon - One Thousand Things Worth Knowing: Poems

Acknowledgments are due to the editors of: The American Reader , Arts Tonight (RT), Catamaran Literary Reader , The Guardian , Little Star , The Mimic Octopus , The Paris Review , The Penny Dreadful , Plume , PN Review , Poetry & Audience , Poetry Daily , Poetry London , The Poetry Review , Princeton Magazine , Radio Silence , TLS , and The Walrus. Several of these poems appeared in Songs and Sonnets , an interim collection published by Enitharmon Press in 2012. A version of Cuthbert and the Otters was commissioned by, and read at, the 2013 Durham Book Festival. Pelt was printed in a limited edition to celebrate the 2013 Folger Poetry Board Reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Charles mile Jacque: Poultry Among Trees appeared in Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art , edited by Janet McLean and published by Thames & Hudson in 2014. Pip and Magwitch appeared in A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens , edited by Peter Robinson and published by Two Rivers Press in 2012.

Rita Duffy: Watchtower II appeared in Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics , edited by Andrew Ridker and published by Black Ocean in 2014. Saffron appeared in Body of Work: Forty Years of Creative Writing at UEA , edited by Giles Foden and published by Full Circle in 2011. A Civil War Suite appeared in Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration , published by the National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian) in 2013. We Love the Horse Because Its Haunch was delivered as the 2013 Phi Beta Kappa poem at Princeton University. Anonymous: From Marban and Guaire appeared in The Finest Musi c : Early Irish Lyrics , edited by Maurice Riordan and published by Faber and Faber Limited in 2014. Federico Garca Lorca: Death was written for the New York Public Librarys 2013 celebration of Federico Garca Lorcas Poet in New York .

A Giraffe was published in a limited edition by the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom in 2012. Dromedaries and Dung Beetles appeared in 1914: Poetry Remembers , edited by Carol Ann Duffy and published by Faber and Faber Limited in 2013. The Firing Squad was published in a limited edition by the University of Connecticut in 2014, while lvaro de Campos: Belfast, 1922 was published as a broadside by Emory University that same year. Camille Pissarro: Apple Picking at Eragny-sur-Epte was commissioned in 2013 by the Dallas Museum of Art. New Weather (1973) Mules (1977) Why Brownlee Left (1980) Quoof (1983) Meeting the British (1987) Selected Poems 1968 1986 (1987) Madoc: A Mystery (1990) The Annals of Chile (1994) Hay (1998) Poems 1968 1998 (2001) Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) Horse Latitudes (2006) The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures (2006) Maggot (2010) The Word on the Street: Rock Lyrics (2013) In memory of Seamus Heaney Notwithstanding the fact that one of them has gnawed a strip of flesh from the shoulder of the salmon, relieving it of a little darne, the fish these six otters would fain carry over the sandstone limen and into Cuthberts cell, a fish garlanded with bay leaves and laid out on a linden flitch like a hauberked warrior laid out on his shield, may yet be thought of as whole. An entire fish for an abbots supper.

Its true theyve yet to develop the turnip clamp and the sword with a weighted pommel but the Danes are already dyeing everything beige. In anticipation, perhaps, of the carpet and mustard factories built on ground first broken by the Brigantes. The Benedictines still love a bit of banter along with the Beatitudes. Blessed is the trundle bed, it readies us for the tunnel from Spital Tongues to the staithes. Im at once full of dread and in complete denial. I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead.

In the way that 9 and 3 are a perfect match an Irish war band has 27 members. In Barrow-in-Furness a shipyard man scans a wall for a striking wrench as a child might mooch for blackberries in a ditch. In times to come the hydrangea will mark most edges of empire. For the moment Im hemmed in every bit as much by sorrow as by the crush of cattle along the back roads from Durham to Desertmartin. Diseart meaning a hermitage. In Ballynahone Bog theyre piling still more turf in a cart.

It seems one manifestation of the midge may have no mouthparts. Heartsore yet oddly heartened, Ive watched these six otters make their regal progress across the threshold. I see how they might balk at their burden. A striped sail will often take years to make. They wear wolf or bear pelts, the berserkers. Like the Oracle at Delphi, whose three-legged stool straddles a fiery trough amid the still-fuming heaps of slag, theyre almost certainly on drugs.

Perhaps a Viking sail handler, himself threatened with being overwhelmed, will have gone out on a limb and invented a wind tiller by lashing a vane to the helm? That a longship has been overturned on the moor is as much as we may surmise of a beehive cell thrown up along the Tyne. The wax moth lives in a beehive proper. It can detect sound frequencies up to 300 kHz. The horse in the stable may be trained to follow a scent. What looks like a growth of stubble has to do with the chin drying out. I straighten my black tie as the pallbearer who almost certainly filched that strip of skin draws level with me.

Did I say calamine? I meant chamomile. For the tearoom nearest to Grizedale Tarn its best to follow the peat stain of Grizedale Beck. A prototype of backgammon was played by the Danes. Even Mozart would resort to a recitative for moving things along. Halfway through whats dissolved into the village of Bellaghy, this otter steps out from under the bier and offers me his spot. It seems even an otter may subordinate himself whilst being first in line to revolt.

He may be at once complete insider and odd man out. Columbanus is said to have tamed a bear and harnessed it to a plow. Bach. The sarabande. Under the floor of Cuthberts cell theyve buried the skull of a colt born with a curvature of the spine. Even now we throw down a challenge like a keel whilst refraining from eating peach pits for fear of cyanide.

Refrain as in frenum , a bridle. We notice how a hook on the hind wing of a moth connects it to an eye on the forewing. A complex joint if ever there was one. According to our tanners, the preservation of hides involves throwing caution to the wind. Their work permits allowed Vikings to sack Armagh in 832. The orange twine helps us keep things straight.

I once sustained concussion, having been hit by a boom in Greenwich, and saw three interlocking red triangles on my beer mat. The way to preserve a hide is not by working into it Irish moss or casein but the very brains of the very beast that was erstwhile so comfortable in its skin. Irish monasticism may well derive from Egypt. We dont discount the doings of the Desert Fox any more than Lily Langtrys shenanigans with Prince Louis of Battenberg. The 1920s vogue for sequins began with Tutankhamen. Five wise virgins are no more likely than five foolish to trim a fish-oil lamp to illumine the process of Benedictine nuns spinning and weaving yarns.

I dont suppose well ever get to grips with the bane of so many scholarsthe word SINIMIAINIAIS inscribed on a Viking sword. As for actually learning to grieve, it seems to be a nonstarter. The floor of Cuthberts cell is flush with the floor of Ballynahone Bog after the first autumn rains, the gantries, the Woodbines, the drop scones, the overflowing basins chipped enamel, the earths old ointment box, the collop of lox, the drumroll of wrens at which we still tend to look askance. This style of nasal helmet was developed by the Phrygians while they were stationed at Castledawson. The barrow at Belas Knap was built before the pyramids. Same thing with Newgrange.

The original seven-branched menorahs based on a design by Moses himself. When it comes to the crunch we can always fall back on potassium bromide as an anticonvulsant. A chamomile tisane in a tearoom near the Bigrigg iron mine. Since the best swords are still made from imported steel, the more literal among us cant abide the thought an island may be tidal. This is the same Cuthbert whose chalice cloth will be carried into battle on the point of a spear. I can just about visualize a banner of half-digested fish fluttering through the air from the otter spraint piled high at the threshold of Cuthberts dry stone holt.